1Introvert Insights/September 2017

Alone Time Comes in Different Flavors—Which One Do You Favor?

Ilumination and Inspiration for Introverts

I’ve always believed that the very introverted concept of alone time was

straightforward and self-evident. We introverts want, even need, our alone time each day to regroup, recharge, replenish, restore. It’s practically in our DNA.

Embedded in this thinking, though, is a flawed assumption: that the definition of alone time is itself self-evident. And constant.

It’s neither.

The Many Versions of Alone Time

When I think of alone time—the kind of alone time I seek out …

usually—I picture being truly alone, as in all by myself. I’m in a perfectly or almost perfectly quiet place, sur-rounded by lots of breathing time and space, free to let my mind wan-der and my heart ponder with no in-terruptions. Think wilderness.

That’s what alone time is.

But wait. Sometimes I don’t want to be alone all alone; sometimes I want to be alone with a few other people around!

So I inevitably go to a coffee shop. Not just any coffee shop, mind you. I need one that offers a little ac-

tivity and a small dose of humanity around me, though not too much. If music is blaring through the over-head speakers, forget it. Same goes if there’s any risk of me running into people I know, or stumbling into strangers who want to chat.

OK, that’s what alone time is.

But wait. My wife Adrianne, also an introvert, just about never wants to be literally alone during her ver-sion of alone time. In fact, she says, ideally she spends her alone time with me (which gets interesting when I’m looking for my own most frequent version of alone time … i.e., being alone—but I digress).

Adrianne generally likes to spend her introverted alone time with one other person, as long as said person is a grown-up. (She’s a kindergarten teacher. Need I say more?)

OK, that’s what alone time is.

But wait. On weekday mornings especially, Adrianne craves, well, my kind of alone time. Or should I say my primary kind of alone time, the truly alone kind of alone time I seek out. Most often, at least.

INSIDEThe Introvert Life 2

Research You Can Use 3

Reflective Reads 3

Half of Us Are Introverts 4

Introvert Inspirations 6

Continued on page 6

September 2017

2 Introvert Insights/September 2017

SOCIAL ACTIVITIES

TIME MANAGEMENT

Fuel Up for Social Situations That Drain Your Energy Tank

I’m not one for class reunions; I

don’t even attend my own. But I’d do anything for my beautiful wife.

So it was that I found myself pre-paring to accompany Adrianne to her high school reunion recently.

I would know virtually no one there, and they would all be ever so slightly younger than I—as I am ever so slightly (12 years) older than Adri-anne. The setting would be an old barn turned into a combination ball-room/bar/restaurant, so I could ex-pect the atmosphere to be frenzied.

And did I mention that I would know virtually no one there?

THE INTROVERT LIFE

Sometimes, there’s a fine line be-tween healthy introversion and a lit-tle less healthy social anxiety. This particular outing constituted a mixed bag for me: 90 percent intro-version, 10 percent social anxiety.

I can (and do) work on social anxi-ety. But when it comes to introver-sion and social situations, I don’t need to fix anything. Neither do you if you’re an introvert.

We just need to prepare, wisely, for the inevitable energy drain that will come when we participate in even the best of social activities.

How? Well, I wrung as much recharging

as I could out of the rest of the day leading up to the reunion, making

sure, for example, that I got plenty of time to sit outside my in-laws’ house and read.

I also made peace with the idea that as much as I—like so many in-troverts—am invigorated by deep, meaningful conversations, this type of event typically doesn’t offer them.

Finally, at the event itself, I made a point of seeking out the old teach-ers in attendance as well as the handful of Adrianne’s classmates I had in fact met previously.

I made sure to take the occasional break, too. (Hello, bathroom.)

Prepare your own way for social events. Just prepare somehow so

that instead of merely hoping for the best, you’ll set yourself up for it.

Efficiency Is in the Eye of the Beholder—So Work Your Way

As an introvert, you may have

your own contrarian ideas about how to use your time wisely.

Embrace them.That’s what my wife, Adrianne,

did recently as she was preparing her

kindergarten classroom for the start of school.

It was an extra-difficult task this year. Virtually every teacher in the school had to move to new rooms as a result of enrollment growth. More-over, Adrianne was switching from teaching first grade to kindergarten, so she had to create an assortment of new materials and room setups.

At one point she became discour-aged; as she looked around at what her fellow teachers were doing in their new rooms—and how (appar-ently) quickly they were doing it—she felt like she wasn’t keeping up.

But as an introvert with her own preferred working style, Adrianne had made a conscious choice before-hand to go ahead and take on tasks one at a time—the way she likes to do. Start Task A, finish Task A.

Start Task B, finish Task B. Start Task C, finish Task C. And so on.

Smart move, my dear.I only half-jokingly call this ap-

proach inefficient efficiency, and it’s a

common introverted strategy for get-ting things done. It just doesn’t look like what the typical time-manage-ment guru might promote.

Whereas some people live for jug-gling, many introverts would rather focus on one task, one problem, one activity at a time. Even if, in the short term, it appears to throw true efficiency to the dogs.

So what? If it works for you and you still meet your deadlines and obligations, then it works for you and you still meet your deadlines and obligations.

Go ahead: Work the way you

want to.

3Introvert Insights/September 2017

RESEARCH YOU CAN USE

REFLECTIVE READS

If You’re an Introvert, What You Spend Money on Matters

Turns out money can indeed buy

happiness—especially if you’re an introvert and what you buy aligns with your personality, according to a recent article in Psychological Science.

The article describes two studies conducted by Sandra Matz, Joe Gladstone, and David Stillwell of the University of Cambridge.

The first looked at more than 76,000 bank transactions of 625 par-ticipants. It found that, on average, participants spent more money on products that matched their person-alities than on products that did not.

Moreover, participants who bought products that more closely aligned with their personalities re-ported being more satisfied in life.

In the second study, 79 university students (36 extraverts, 43 introverts)

were randomly given vouchers to spend, within two days, either on an “introverted” product (a book) or an “extraverted” product (an item they needed to consume at a bar).

The introverts strongly favored the book voucher, the study found, whereas the extraverts were essen-

tially content with either option.In fact, “The effects of psycholog-

ical fit were found to be more pro-nounced for introverted than for extraverted participants,” the re-searchers note.

Source: Psychological Science, (27)5

(2016), pp. 715-725.

Maybe It’s No Wonder That So Many Introverts Crave Nature

If your introversion, on its own,

doesn’t compel you to invest some of your time bathing in nature’s reflec-tive calm, then maybe nature’s di-verse health benefits—physical, psy-chological, cognitive, spiritual—will (finally) convince you to get outside and get away from it all. Often.

We humans are prone to treating time in nature “as a luxury,” writes Florence Williams, author of the fas-cinating new book The Nature Fix:

Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Health-

ier, and More Creative.

But as she demonstrates, through

her presentation of extensive re-search findings as well as through stories about her own experiences, time in nature is “a necessity.”

How can, say, a walk in the woods actually help you, especially if you’re an introvert? Where exactly

is the apparent magic within “the nature fix”?

It could be in the soothing aromas of various essential oils in the trees, researchers are finding. Or in the soothing sounds of the wind blowing or birds singing. Or in the tantalizing visuals of colorful landscapes.

It’s undoubtedly a combination of sensory inputs and human biolog-ical needs and design, Williams says. But understanding how it all works is almost beside the point. Understanding that nature matters is what matters.

“Most of us don’t know we’re missing anything,” Williams con-cludes. But far too often, we are.

4 Introvert Insights/September 2017

It May Feel Like an Extraverted World, but the Truth Is That Half of Us—Yes, Half—Are Introverts

“Half of us. “Half of us prefer introversion

to extroversion,” stresses psycholo-gist Laurie Helgoe in her thorough and inspiring book Introvert Power:

Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden

Strength.

You can practically hear the plaintiveness in Helgoe’s voice, ema-nating from the page. It’s as though she’s sitting right in front of you, shaking her head in an odd combi-nation of lingering incredulity on the one hand and a profound desire to shout the truth on the other.

She’s hardly alone in her cogni-tive dissonance.

“When I share this [half of us] re-ality with introverts,” she continues, “they consistently react with disbe-lief. Half. I almost have to say it as a mantra to myself, because I also have been programmed to believe that our numbers are few.”

Same here. And it’s almost certainly the same

for you, too, if you’re an introvert, particularly here in the United States and in other western countries.

But the numbers simply don’t lie. The reality is that the introvert-extravert ratio splits down the mid-dle. Comprehensive data gathered by the Center for the Application of Psychological Type, based on a sam-ple of more than 900,000 people who have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, put the probable proportion of introverts in the popu-lation at between 47 and 55 percent.

So yes indeed: Half of us—half of us—are introverts.

Why, then, does it so often—and so maddeningly—seem like we live

as relative outliers in an apparently extraverted world?

The Media Often Misdirect Us

In some ways, the answer to this question is painfully obvious.

We are surrounded each day by media messages that skew largely toward extraverts and extraverted activities. Watch TV for just a few minutes and you’ll be hit with ads touting the zippy new car you should buy, or urging you to hurry to the dazzling theme park your fam-ily should visit.

When’s the last time you saw a calm TV spot selling you a week’s worth of quiet solitude in the middle of nowhere?

Often, the media are also complic-it in spreading (through articles, especially) a wildly misleading intro-vert/extravert-ratio statistic: namely, that only 1 in 4 of us are introverts.

Breaking news: That figure origi-nally came from a very small study … which involved only high school boys … and was conducted more than 50 years ago. Yet it somehow lives on, entrenching itself in our collective psyches.

But wait! (to borrow the over-the-top tone and language of the TV ads). There’s much, much more!

Or there could be, at least, accord-ing to Dartmouth College business professors Daniel Feiler and Adam Kleinbaum.

Networks Skew Extravert

In their fascinating 2015 Psycholog-

ical Science article entitled “Populari-

ty, Similarity, and the Network Ex-traversion Bias,” Feiler and Klein-baum describe a cleverly designed study they conducted with an entire cohort of 284 incoming MBA stu-dents, none of whom knew each oth-er as their program was beginning.

Once five weeks after orientation and again 11 weeks after orientation, the students were asked to answer this question:

Consider the people with whom you

like to spend your free time. Since you

arrived at [university name], who are

the classmates you have been with

most often for informal social

activities, such as going out to lunch,

dinner, drinks, films, visiting one an-

other’s homes, and so on?

“To avoid problems of incom-plete recall,” Feiler and Kleinbaum emphasize, “we included in our sur-vey a list of all other students in the first year of the MBA program.”

The key eye-opening finding of the study: Being an extravert (as assessed by the Big Five Inventory, which all the participants took) “significantly increased the likeli-hood that an individual would cite any given other person as a friend.”

Being an extravert also “signifi-cantly increased the likelihood that an individual would be cited as a friend by any given other person.”

Result: Extraverts end up being overly represented, and introverts underrepresented, in the social net-works of other people. Thus, Feiler and Kleinbaum write, there is an “underlying logic for why people may overestimate the number of ex-traverts in the general population.”

What’s so wrong with that?“A prevalent self-belief that one’s

social behavior is more reclusive than the perceived norm,” the re-searchers note, “may reduce feelings of belongingness, self-esteem, and self-worth.”

No wonder Helgoe—and the rest of us—want to scream sometimes.

How Introverts Really Tick.And Why.

IntrovertManifesto.com

That’s the radically simple idea behind The Introvert Manifesto: Introverts Illuminated, Extraverts Enlightened, by Peter Vogt, editor and publisher of Introvert Insights.

Also available on Amazon

Read extensive excerpts and order your paperback copy now at:

6 Introvert Insights/September 2017

Adrianne loves to sip her coffee at our kitchen table in the near dark of pre-dawn, reading a favorite book

and simply being quiet and still so that she can prepare for her day teaching kids everything from how to cut a piece of paper to how to write their name to how to watch out for other people in life.

OK, that’s what alone time is—

until I or Adrianne or you decide that we want to seek out some other type of alone time.

Your Alone Time, Your Way

When it comes to alone time, then, remember this: Your mileage may vary.

You yourself may need to switch up the times and settings and overall vibes of the instances of alone time you pursue. Know that this is a) nor-

mal, and b) OK. Some days, or even some parts of

days, you’ll feel like having some solitude in genuine solitude—alone,

in pure or near-pure quiet. Other days, or even some parts of days, you’ll instead want to pursue alone time with a bit of the rest of humani-ty thrown in as a side dish.

Remember, too, that the diverse group of people we call introverts is

made up of souls who likely have their own ideas about what alone time is, either as a matter of their general preferences or as a function of their moods, or their time, or their instincts—or d) all of the above.

If you’re an introvert and you have an introverted partner, especial-ly, don’t assume the two of you will always be on the same alone-time page. Talk together about what you each need, and when, and why.

Your alone time is your alone

time. You get to define it. And you’re not limited to one definition.

No one is.

INTROVERT INSPIRATIONS“Introvert integrity means going the distance for what we love: moving from apology to acceptance, from acceptance to acknowledgment, and from acknowledgment to activism.”

~ Laurie Helgoe

“Every time we stomp down our introverted nature, we crush part of our soul in the process.”

~ Michaela Chung

“Introverts aren’t party poopers. They’re just pooped by the party.”

~ Otto Kroeger

“Blessed are those who do not fear solitude, who are not afraid of their own company, who are not always desperately looking for something to do, something to amuse themselves with, something to judge.”

~ Paulo Coelho

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”~ Carl Jung

Continued from page 1

Editor and Publisher: Peter Vogt, M.S.

Introvert Insights is published monthly by Introvert Insights, LLC, 1036 38th Street South, Moorhead, MN 56560. Email: peter@introvertinsights.com.

Copyright © 2017, Introvert Insights, LLC.

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